Thursday, June 10, 2010

We are on our way to French Morocco

(Continuation of Captain Charles Estes's War Memoirs)

"So we were on our way, our dear navigator wasgonna direct this lil' airplane all the way acrossthe ocean to the Azores, and the people on the crew,they didn't know anything about Bob Swain,but I'm sure that they had a question in theirmind, 'Is this guy good enough to fly his wayover there in the dark?' Well, of course theynavigate by the stars at night, and they had been trained in this, and so Bob did a wonderfuljob; and we saw the lights of other airplanesaround us, but we never did see them really.

We finally, when dawn came, could see theocean down below us and we could see boatsdown there; they were making these whiteribbons in the water as they went throughit. They were carrying arms and ammunitionand stuff of that nature across the ocean toEurope. And then we began to see other airplanes around us and we passed a few ofthem; they were B17s and we realized thenthat the B24 was not the slowest airplane with four engines on it, and it was a consolation to us to know at least we were flying something that had a littlespeed to it. I guess our cruising speedthen was 250 miles an hour. Anyway, itwas light and we could look down and seeall these ships in the ocean.

We were about ten hours into our flight and we were wondering where the Azoreswere, and so I called Bob, and I said, 'Bob,how we doing?' And he said, 'Charlie, wedoing fine.' He said, 'We're not going to getthere in time for breakfast, but if we're notthere in time for lunch, we're in trouble.' Well, it just happened that we got there justabout lunchtime, and as we flew over theAzores preparing to land, I noticed thesesheer cliffs that went down to the Oceanseveral hundred feet high. And afterwe got on the ground and had eaten ourlunch we were gonna spend the night there and take off the next day for FrenchMorocco; so we decided to take a littlewalk and go over and see those cliffs and see how high they really were. So we wentover and found the cliffs and looked downand saw the height of them, and it was justmarvelous the sight. I'll never forget it."